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Tag Archives: Lightning

I’ve started using Lightning add-on for Thunderbird lately. Oh and Thunderbird, too. Again.

I just figured Evolution is unreasonably resources demanding, works a bit slowly on my notebook (Intel(R) Core(TM) Duo CPU T2250 @ 1.73GHz, 4GB RAM, ATI Xpress 1250 with 256MB), has a terrible connection error dialog that looks stylish in red and overlays message window list but pops up way too often — with many accounts and a bit flaky Internet connection and/or frequent sleep and resume cycles that gets just irritating because as a user I have to dismiss them manually or else they remain in their place forever limiting view of the list of new and old messages. Evolution also offers a pretty inconvenient way to turn HTML formatting on or off on a per single message basis. You’d have to go all the way to preferences and locate it in some section and tick the box off or on to get a single e-mail sent out in HTML if you prefer plain-text most of the time. That’s just too time-consuming and frustrating and IS a lot of work. Finally, I figured it crashes quite often under certain circumstances. Overall it works stable 98% of the time and is a very good mature e-mail client and I’d personally recommend it to a lot of people.

I didn’t feel like hunting down its bugs, though, because at the end of the day performance wise I’d still not be happy with Evolution, so I decided to give Thunderbird another try. I used to run it, it was OK. It met most of my expectations back then but at some point in time I defined my own user policy where I’d strive to use default DE applications as much as I could. I felt it would give me a more consistent look and feel, which kinda matters to me when I become a regular desktop user and not a Linux administrator who works mostly with black terminal and a web-browser.

So, I used to use KMail and Evolution and they were both OK. Since the last time I’ve used Thunerbird it got a cool add-ons manager and plenty of useful extensions (like Lightning, Gnome Integration, Copy As Plain Text, Personal Level Indicators, etc.) as well as nifty personas, sort of skins that can deliver a really nice touch of personality to your Thunderbird if chosen wisely. Some of the extensions that I found useful and a very cool persona/skin can be seen in this screenshot: